分类： society

BERLIN – Law enforcement officials in Germany have confirmed that a suspect has been taken into custody following a fatal knife attack that claimed the life of a 31-year-old British national early Sunday in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim.

The violent assault unfolded at Rosenheim’s central train station, where the woman was found with critical stab wounds, Rosenheim Police Department announced in a public statement. Responding medical teams immediately transported the victim to a local acute care hospital, but medical staff were unable to save her life, and she was pronounced dead shortly after arrival due to the severity of her injuries.

Immediately after the attack, local law enforcement requested backup from federal police units, who arrived at the scene rapidly and apprehended the 27-year-old suspect without further incident. Investigators have confirmed the suspect is a German citizen who resides in the neighboring county of Fürstenfeldbruck, located roughly 60 kilometers from Rosenheim.

In adherence to strict German data privacy regulations, authorities have declined to disclose the full names of both the victim and the accused. As of the latest update, the investigation remains in its active early phase, with detectives still working to piece together the full sequence of events and establish a clear motive for the deadly attack.

Investigators have issued a public appeal for information, asking any members of the public who were present at the Rosenheim train station between late Saturday night and early Sunday morning to come forward. Specifically, law enforcement is seeking details from any witnesses who may have observed a verbal dispute or physical confrontation in the station during that time frame, which could provide critical context to the attack.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, a deadly shooting rocked a pre-planned rave event near Aarau, a city roughly 29 miles west of Zurich in northern Switzerland, leaving one person dead and five others wounded, local law enforcement confirmed.

Aargau Cantonal Police launched a massive, coordinated operation across the region immediately after the incident, with authorities confirming that a widespread manhunt is currently underway for an unidentified attacker. As of the latest updates, officials have not identified any clear motives for the violence, nor have they pieced together the full, exact circumstances of how the shooting unfolded.

The attack occurred in Schachen, close to a local horse racing track, where an overnight rave had been scheduled to run into the early hours of Sunday. In response to the shooting, law enforcement has sealed off a large perimeter that encompasses the horse racing track, the town’s public swimming pool, and the local sports field. Police have issued a formal urgent plea for members of the public to avoid the entire cordoned area to preserve the crime scene and ensure public safety.

Visuals captured from the region early Sunday show a overwhelming police presence, including an armored police vehicle positioned to block a key roadway. Beyond the immediate area around Aarau, police confirmed that they have deployed a large contingent of additional officers as a precautionary measure to prevent any further risk to the public.

Beyond local police and fire department personnel, regional broadcaster SRF reports that the cantonal disaster response unit (KKE) was also activated to support the response operation. Additionally, a Swiss Army helicopter was deployed to conduct aerial surveys of the area in the early hours of the response to aid the search for the perpetrator.

Authorities are now calling on any witnesses who were present in the area at the time of the incident to submit any photographs or video footage they captured of the scene to help investigators piece together what happened and identify the attacker.

GENEVA – A deadly act of gun violence has shaken the northern Swiss canton of Aargau, leaving one attendee dead and five others wounded — several critically — after a shooting erupted at a large rave event early Sunday, according to local law enforcement and regional media reports. Authorities have launched an extensive manhunt for an unknown attacker, who remains at large as of the latest updates.

In a public post on the social platform X, Aargau Cantonal Police confirmed that the search for the unidentified perpetrator is still active, adding that both potential motives for the attack and the full, exact sequence of events remain unconfirmed. The shooting unfolded at the seventh iteration of the popular “Aarau Rave VOL. 7”, which was being hosted at the horse racing facility located in Aarau’s Schachen neighborhood. Aarau, the capital of the Aargau canton, sits roughly 29 miles west of Switzerland’s largest city Zurich, and is home to a population of approximately 22,300 people.

Police spokesperson Pascal Wenzel told Swiss public broadcaster SRF that local authorities received the first emergency alert about the shooting at approximately 2:30 a.m. local time. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, local fire services deployed to cordon off a wide perimeter around the rave site, and a large-scale coordinated police operation was launched to secure the area and locate the suspect. Residents of Aarau and nearby communities were formally urged to avoid the entire Schachen district area to support ongoing emergency and investigative work.

Many attendees initially misidentified the sound of gunfire as celebratory fireworks, according to reporting from leading Swiss daily newspaper Blick. It was only after a panicked attendee shouted warnings for everyone to take cover that crowds realized the danger, the outlet reported. Blick also noted that the violence broke out moments after the scheduled end of the rave event. Law enforcement has issued a public appeal for any witnesses who may have captured photographs or video footage of the incident, asking them to share the material with investigating teams to help advance the case.

For decades, Arthur Kermalvezen, a man conceived via sperm donation, lived with a persistent, unsettling mystery: any man he encountered – from his grade school teacher to strangers on the city bus – could have been his biological father. This uncertainty bred deep anger and unrest, leaving him unable to feel grounded in his own identity. What he never expected was that this lifelong question would become even more urgent when he fell in love with Audrey, another Paris-born donor-conceived woman, whom he met at a 2010 gathering for donor-conceived rights activists.

The pair experienced immediate, undeniable chemistry, describing their first meeting as love at first sight. But their new romance came with a alarming possibility: in the era when they were conceived, Paris had only two operating sperm banks, and most donors contributed sperm multiple times to help more couples conceive. This meant the chance of them sharing the same biological father – and being half-siblings – was far from hypothetical. Before they could build a life together, they needed an answer. Yet France’s strict laws around donor anonymity and genetic testing made that answer almost impossible to obtain legally.

Since 1994, France has barred private citizens from accessing or using at-home DNA testing kits, making personal genetic testing a criminal offense. Only licensed doctors, research scientists, and judges are legally permitted to order and oversee genetic analysis. Anyone caught with a personal testing kit can face fines of more than €3,500, and major direct-to-consumer DNA companies including 23andMe, Ancestry, and MyHeritage do not sell their products in the country. Lawmakers and supporters of the ban argue it protects sensitive genetic data from exploitation by commercial entities and prevents unexpected DNA results from tearing families apart. Critics, however, point out that France is the only European nation that criminalizes personal use of these tests.

Audrey, a bioethics lawyer by training, understood the intricacies of French law better than most: the country enshrined donor anonymity in legislation, guaranteeing that identity would remain hidden even after a donor’s death. But Audrey’s conception in 1979 predated this law, leaving her with a legal gray area that offered no clear path to information. While searching online for other donor-conceived people born before the 1994 law went into effect, Audrey found Arthur, who had published a book chronicling his lifelong search for answers about his biological origins. She was immediately struck by how perfectly he captured the confusing, unspoken feelings she had carried her whole life – even though both had grown up in loving, supportive families, the mystery of their biological origins left a permanent hole in their identities.

After their first in-person meeting, the connection was immediate – but so was the problem. No French regulatory or legal body would help them confirm whether they were related. After months of dead ends, they located a doctor in southern France who agreed to conduct a genetic test for €900 in cash, breaking the law to share the result with them directly: they were not related. Still, the couple was left uneasy. They worried the unregulated test was inaccurate, and Audrey, committed to upholding the law, refused to use a black market at-home kit to confirm the result. Starting in 2010, she launched a series of legal challenges against the French system, asking only for access to non-identifying information about her donor, including how many donations he made, to confirm whether she and Arthur could be related. Every challenge was rejected. After three years of fighting, the couple took a leap of faith and married.

In 2015, France’s highest administrative court rejected Audrey’s final appeal. It was only shortly before the birth of their first child that another doctor agreed to bend the rules: he checked their donors’ birth years in the confidential sperm bank records, and confirmed their donors were two different men. The result was life-changing, but it came only from an illegal act. “It’s completely weird,” Audrey said of the ruling that allows doctors to know more about her own origins than she does. Even after this confirmation, Arthur still carried doubts, so years later, the couple finally agreed to take an at-home DNA test, ordered through a friend in a neighboring country where the kits are legal. The test confirmed what the doctor had told them: they were not related.

That illegal test unlocked far more than just reassurance for the couple. In 2017, Arthur finally connected with his biological sperm donor on Christmas Day, ending decades of uncertainty. For Audrey, the surprise was even greater: one of her DNA matches was Sophie, a fellow donor-conceived activist whom she had represented in court years earlier. The two women, who had fought side-by-side for legal rights, were biological sisters. When the couple took the test alongside eight other fellow activists, the results revealed just how high the risk of accidental genetic relations really is: four of the ten participants shared the same donor, including Audrey, Sophie, and their two brothers.

Years later, a DNA match with an American relative led Audrey to her own donor, a man named Philippe, but he had already passed away. Audrey’s mother wrote a letter to Philippe’s family, thanking them for the “immeasurable gift” he had given, and the family welcomed Audrey into their lives. Philippe’s own sister had never known he was a sperm donor, and the meeting gave Audrey answers she had chased for decades: she got access to her full biological medical history, saw photos and videos of her donor, and finally got to know the story of her origins.

The couple’s years of activism – Audrey’s legal challenges and Arthur’s writing – helped drive a landmark change to French donor conception law: people conceived after April 2025 will now be able to access identifying information about their donors once they reach adulthood. Yet the fight is not over: France still remains one of the only European countries to ban at-home DNA testing, and thousands of donor-conceived people born before 2025 still lack legal access to information about their origins. Audrey says the core of the fight is simple: “Every person has the right to know their origins and the right to know their history.”

This story is based on an episode of *The Gift* on BBC Radio 4.